(Beware the foam...)

People I've met over the years have mentioned having the same problem I do where I can't shut down my mind enough to fall asleep. It's like constantly having wheels turning at high speed and once you quiet one of them you realize how many others there are and spend time rushing from one thing to another trying to calm things down enough to get some sleep.

At least one writer I know has this problem to such a degree that she once said she banged her cranium on the headboard of her bed in an effort to knock herself unconscious. I'm not there yet thankfully but nights like this make me come close.

The problem as usual is that I'm awake. Sounds simple right? Why don't I try being _not_ awake? Frankly it doesn't work that way. Once I'm awake I have so many things and ideas that I can't focus. If I can't focus I can't quiet my mind. If I can't quiet my mind there's no way in hell I'm going to get to sleep. Add the restless legs and arms. Always feeling too warm unless a fan is blowing directly on me. Any little house noise puts me on guard and I have to get up and check it out.

It all adds up to sleepless nights.

Often I get chided for taking naps but honestly I need them. I've always needed them. If my body and mind decide to put me out for a couple hours so much the better. And often those naps help far more than sleeping in on Sunday. (Which BTW is the only day I really am able to sleep in these days.)

So what do I do on these nights? Well sometimes I converse with other sleepless friends across the world. Sometimes I write. (Chapter 6 of Becoming Twilight is up BTW. I finished it tonight.) Other nights I sketch but that doesn't happen too often. Most often what happens is I either try and go to sleep then fail and am up on the web all night until I'm too exhausted to stay awake. Or I sleep an hour or two, get up, go back to bed and sleep another hour or two, lather, rinse, repeat.

Tonight it was writing plus reading a manga online - Arakawa Under the Bridge. Between that I seem to have started to exhaust my brain with just enough time to get enough sleep to function.

Provided the phone doesn't ring with a 911 tech support call that is.

I swear if I could get away with taking a sedative every night to knock me out I would. So far only heavy sedatives seem to work properly. Everything else works in reverse and spins the wheels even faster. Meditation helps sometimes. Exercise other times. Nothing seems to be consistent. I even stop being affected by the sedatives in a relatively short period of time.

*yawn*

Looks like the lunar princess wants a visit with me finally. Good night!

For how tired I was when we first came home from having dinner with the in-laws I'm surprised I'm awake. But then I remember lying on the futon in the library for a bit so I might have napped and not realized it. I was that tired.

Speaking of in-laws my father-in-law gave me his Ryobi gas leaf blower/vacuum. It's pretty cool. Besides being a blower it's also a mulching vac. I intend to put it to use this weekend.

Looking at what's left outside I really want to put up a fence between the house and the garage but because I need to get the lawn tractor in and out of there I need a fairly large door. AND there has to be a simple human door so we can get in and out to the back door of the house. I wonder if I can design simple temporary partitions that can be moved as needed,

So...awake again. This time I went to bed at around 11:00pm and woke up around 3:00am. And my mind is already full of things from work. Wonderful. (Oh and the title is just a title. No wife issues here.)

Not a bad thing really as it's been a long time since I had things from work to focus on. I've got a few tasks I'm behind on but I really need to run them by others to find out what the company procedure is about them. I'll hopefully do that today.( Cut to spare people from my rambling... )

So this morning I woke up extremely sore but it was actually a good thing.

In the past I mentioned that I kept feeling like things were touching my face while I was trying to get to sleep in our bedroom. Well while we were out replacing our knife sharpener yesterday I ran across something I didn't think of before - sleep masks.

Never thought I'd say this but it worked like a charm. I still got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom but when I got back to bed I went back to sleep. In the morning I was sore because I didn't really move around all night. That means REM sleep.

I don't know what's going on overall but whatever it is the mask seems to help.